eyes. ‘We’ve no time to waste. Get him here at once. Understand? At once!’
Matthews saluted and hurried away. Miller cleared his throat and clucked his tongue sadly.
‘These hotels are all the same. The goin’s-on – you’d never believe your eyes. Remember once I was at a convention in Cincinnati –’
Mallory shook his head wearily.
‘You have a fixation about hotels, Corporal. This is a military establishment and these are army officers’ billets.’
Miller made to speak but changed his mind. The American was a shrewd judge of people. There were those who could be ribbed and those who could not be ribbed. An almost hopeless mission, Miller was quietly aware, and as vital as it was, in his opinion, suicidal, but he was beginning to understand why they’d picked this tough, sunburnt New Zealander to lead it.
They sat in silence for the next five minutes, then looked up as the door opened. Captain Briggs was hatless and wore a white silk muffler round his throat in place of the usual collar and tie. The white contrasted oddly with the puffed red of the heavy neck and face above. These had been red enough when Mallory had first seen them in the colonel’s office – high blood pressure and even higher living, Mallory had supposed: the extra deep shades of red and purple now present probably sprang from a misplaced sense of righteous indignation. A glance at the choleric eyes, gleaming light-blue prawns afloat in a sea of vermilion, was quite enough to confirm the obvious.
‘I think this is a bit much, Captain Mallory!’ The voice was high pitched in anger, more nasal than ever. I’m not the duty errand-boy, you know. I’ve had a damned hard day and –’
‘Save it for your biography,’ Mallory said curtly, ‘and take a gander at this character in the corner.’
Briggs’s face turned an even deeper hue. He stepped into the room, fists balled in anger, then stopped in his tracks as his eye lit on the crumpled, dishevelled figure still crouched in the corner of the room.
‘Good God!’ he ejaculated. ‘Nicolai!’
‘You know him.’ It was a statement, not a question.
‘Of course I know him!’ Briggs snorted. ‘Everybody knows him. Nicolai. Our laundry-boy.’
‘Your laundry-boy! Do his duties entail snooping around the corridors at night, listening at keyholes?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What I say.’ Mallory was very patient. ‘We caught him listening outside the door.’
‘Nicolai? I don’t believe it!’
‘Watch it, mister,’ Miller growled. ‘Careful who you call a liar. We all saw him.’
Briggs stared in fascination at the black muzzle of the automatic waving negligently in his direction, gulped, looked hastily away.
‘Well, what if you did?’ He forced a smile. ‘Nicolai can’t speak a word of English.’
‘Maybe not,’ Mallory agreed dryly. ‘But he understands it well enough.’ He raised his hand. ‘I’ve no desire to argue all night and I certainly haven’t the time. Will you please have this man placed under arrest, kept in solitary confinement and incommunicado for the next week at least. It’s vital. Whether he’s a spy or just too damned nosy, he knows far too much. After that, do what you like. My advice is to kick him out of Castelrosso.’
‘Your advice, indeed!’ Briggs’s colour returned, and with it his courage. ‘Who the hell are you to give me advice or to give me orders, Captain Mallory?’ There was a heavy emphasis on the word ‘captain’.
‘Then I’m asking it as a favour,’ Mallory pleaded wearily. ‘I can’t explain, but it’s terribly important. There are hundreds of lives –’
‘Hundreds of lives!’ Briggs sneered. ‘Melodramatic stuff and nonsense!’ He smiled unpleasantly. ‘I suggest you keep that for your cloak-and-dagger biography, Captain Mallory.’
Mallory rose, walked round the table, stopped a foot away from Briggs. The brown eyes were still and very cold.
‘I could go and see your colonel, I suppose. But I’m tired of arguing. You’ll do exactly as I say or I’ll go straight to Naval HQ and get on the radio-telephone to Cairo. And if I do,’ Mallory went on, ‘I swear to you that you’ll be on the next ship home to England – and on the troop-deck, at that.’
His last words seemed to echo in the little room for an interminable time: the stillness was intense. And then, as suddenly as it had arisen, the tension was gone and Briggs’s face, a now curiously mottled white and red, was slack and sullen in defeat.
‘All right, all right,’ he said. ‘No need for all these damned stupid threats – not if it means all that much to you.’ The attempt to bluster, to patch up the shredded rags of his dignity, was pathetic in its transparency. ‘Matthews – call out the guard.’
The torpedo-boat, great aero engines throttled back half speed, pitched and lifted, pitched and lifted with monotonous regularity as it thrust its way into the long, gentle swell from the WNW. For the hundredth time that night Mallory looked at his watch.
‘Running behind time, sir?’ Stevens suggested.
Mallory nodded.
‘We should have stepped straight into this thing from the Sunderland – there was a hold-up.’
Brown grunted. ‘Engine trouble, for a fiver.’ The Clydeside accent was very heavy.
‘Yes, that’s right.’ Mallory looked up, surprised. ‘How did you know?’
‘Always the same with these blasted MTB engines,’ Brown growled. ‘Temperamental as a film star.’
There was silence for a time in the tiny blacked-out cabin, a silence broken only by the occasional clink of a glass. The Navy was living up to its traditional hospitality.
‘If we’re late,’ Miller observed at last, ‘why doesn’t the skipper open her up? They tell me these crates can do forty to fifty knots.’
‘You look green enough already,’ Stevens said tactlessly. ‘Obviously, you’ve never been in an MTB full out in a heavy sea.’
Miller fell silent a moment. Clearly, he was trying to take his mind off his internal troubles. ‘Captain?’
‘Yes, what is it?’ Mallory answered sleepily. He was stretched full length on a narrow settee, an almost empty glass in his fingers.
‘None of my business, I know, boss, but – would you have carried out that threat you made to Captain Briggs?’
Mallory laughed.
‘It is none of your business, but – well, no, Corporal, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t because I couldn’t. I haven’t all that much authority invested in me – and I didn’t even know whether there was a radio-telephone in Castelrosso.’
‘Yeah. Yeah, do you know, I kinda suspected that.’
